mallet
Americannoun
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a hammerlike tool with a head commonly of wood but occasionally of rawhide, plastic, etc., used for driving any tool with a wooden handle, as a chisel, or for striking a surface.
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the wooden implement used to strike the balls in croquet.
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Polo. the long-handled stick, or club, used to drive the ball.
noun
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a tool resembling a hammer but having a large head of wood, copper, lead, leather, etc, used for driving chisels, beating sheet metal, etc
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a long stick with a head like a hammer used to strike the ball in croquet or polo
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a very large powerful steam locomotive with a conventional boiler but with two separate articulated engine units
Etymology
Origin of mallet
1375–1425; late Middle English maillet < Middle French, equivalent to mail maul + -et -et
Explanation
A mallet is a tool with a large, barrel-shaped, head — used to pound on something. You might use a mallet to strike an instrument or in playing croquet. Yeah, right. A mallet is a long-handled implement with a barrel-shaped head used in games like croquet or polo. In music, a mallet is a stick with a rounded end that is sometimes padded, used to strike percussion instruments like timpani, bells, or a marimba. Use your yarn or rubber mallets to play the marimba, and use your wooden mallets to play the xylophone.
Vocabulary lists containing mallet
100 Great Words from "Fahrenheit 451" -- Part I Vocabulary
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Chains
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The Shining
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Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
Alternatively, use a meat mallet to flatten and add a pattern to the cookies.
From Salon • Dec. 13, 2025
Danger feels suspended in the soft-blue light, in which the lion’s tail and the round, silvery moon, balanced just-so, are poised like a raised mallet and gong.
From The Wall Street Journal • Nov. 15, 2025
Meanwhile, Alison Ungaro, founder of the wellness non-profit UThrive Wellness, conducts the sound bath, gently circling the bowls with a mallet and intermittently hitting a small gong, while Ebsen guides her horses into the enclosure.
From Los Angeles Times • Apr. 9, 2025
"While wielding the mallet... a shock in my eye, I have to be hospitalised. Retinal detachment," he would write in a memoir years later.
From BBC • Jan. 7, 2025
The remaining icicles were put into the pail, and with the mallet, Duane hammered them and crushed them into something like snow, but still with the icy crunch he preferred.
From "The Very, Very Far North" by Dan Bar-el
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
